How Grows the Garden

A day in the life of our garden!  A lovely day, though hot and dry.

Above, the long view from our porch.    Following, close up; left to right ...

The two new'ish 4x5 beds

I also took some pictures to show where the sun is on the garden at various times.  To help me plan for next spring planting.  I kind of blew the sun awareness this spring.  What I thought would be full sun wasn't - because of how high the sun moves heading for summer.  Sigh ...

We are getting the Laurel Oak substantially trimmed.  Removing the big branch trying to choke out the live oak.  This is going to add a lot more light to the garden.  That said, next spring, I'm thinking summer squash needs to go over by the rose arbor.  There is also a live oak further along the driveway that is rotted out at the root flare.  It saddens me, but it will be removed seeing as how if it fell it would be the neighbors house it landed on.  It will be interesting to see what will transpire in my compost zone - sunlight wise that is.

On my way out to harvest some things from the garden for dinner; I found two dog walking neighbors standing and discussing my grass.  Grass????  You mean my cultivated green ground cover???   he-he.  Anywho - the one neighbor lady commented on how much she liked my flower garden.  HE-HE!

Today, the arbor inspector came to check out the live oak.  You can't just go willy-nilly cutting down massive live oaks here.  They are historic, and protected.  Fines are really high.  Personally, I think this is excellent.  It saddened me to no end to see some of the majestic live oaks around here get cut down for school/college expansions.  Anywho, as the arbor inspector was leaving, he commented on how lovely my veggie garden is.  And how nice it looks with the flowers mixed with the vegetables.

/preen

The inter-cropping and season transition with elegance is going pretty good.  I messed up on where the sun will be awareness, but otherwise the planning and execution went OK.  Room for improvement of course.  I used my plan and as the in ground planting time was approaching I placed garden art stakes in the places of the slow growing big plants.  Such as eggplant, okra, hot peppers.  As I harvested, I cleared out around the staked areas first.  This let me get seedlings in early, with a bit of elements protection as they grew.

In the salad bar row, I've been planting out a dozen or so dwarf bush cowpea seeds each week.  As they grow, they are filling in the spots from our harvesting.  Seems to be working out OK so far.  Still looks nice.

I've not yet needed to move the 4 tomato pots in the back row.  The okra are coming up OK between them, and the tomato plants continue to do very well.  It helps that the brassicas's help to shade the pots from the afternoon sun.

Time marches on and the garden grows.